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A Batavia Hotel.
If, in this commonplace-loving age, there be one thing more commonplace and utterly devoid of character than another, it is a hotel. Hotels! where be railroads there be they. The locomotive scatters them along its shining path together with cinders, thistle-seeds, and tourists. They are everywhere; and everywhere they are the same. The proverbial peas are not so indistinguishably alike. Surely, a whimsical imagination may be pardoned for fancying a difference between the pods ‘shairpening’ in some Scotch kailyard, the petis-pois coquettishly arranged
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in Chevet's shop-window, and the Zuekererbsen matushed down to a green pulse in some strong-jawed Prussiann's plate - a difference, the far and faint and fanciful analogy to the more obvious one between the gudeman, the French chef, and the Koniglich Preussisclier Dounanen Beamten Gehilfe. But a hotel, on whatever part of Europe it may open its dull window-eyes, has not even a name native of the country, and declaring the citizenship thereof. The genius of speech despairs of making a difference in words, where there is none in facts: and thus, from Orenburg to Valentia, and from Hammerfest to Messina, the thing is still called a hotel. and the traveller still expects and finds the same Swiss portier and the same red velved portières, the same indeseribable smell of sherry, stewed-meat, and eigars in the passages, the same funereallyelas waiters round the table d'hôte, and the same dishes upon it. Thus, I thought in my old European days.
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But, since, I have come to Java, and I have seen a Batavia hotel - a rumah makan. Ah! that was a surprise, a shock, a revelation - I would say ‘un frisson nouvean’ if Batavia and shivering were compatible terms. ‘Un etouffement nouvean’ better expresses my sensations, as it flashed upon me in full noon-day glory. Noon is its own time, its hour of hours, the instant when those opposing elements of Jave life - the native population most conspicuous of a morning, and the European contiagent preponderant in the evening - attuin that exact equipoise which gives the place its peeuliar character: and when the conditions of sky, air, and earth are attuned to truest harmony with it.
The great strong, full noon-day sun beats on the stuccoed buildings, heating their whiteness to an intolerable incandescence. It has set the garden ablaze, burning up the long grey shadows of early morning to roundish
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patches of a charred black, that cling to the foot of the trees: and making the air to quiver visibly above the scorehed yellow grass-plots. Among their dark leafage, the hibiscus flowers flare up like living flame: and the redand-orange blossoms, dropping from the branches of the flamboyant, seem to lie on the path like smouldering embers. Through this blaze of light and colour, move groups of gaudily-draped natives - water-carriers, flower-sellers, fruitvendors, pedlars selling silk and precious stones - their slender body swathed in pink, red, green, or yellow sarongs, their head protected from the sun by an enormous mushroom-shaped hat of plaited straw, and their shinign shoulders bending under a bamboo yoke, from the ends of which dangle baskets of merchandise. Small, brown, chubbgy children, a necklet their one article of wear, are gathering the tiny, yellow-white blossomstars that bespangle the grass under the tanjong trees. Grave- | |
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faced Arabs stride past. Chinamen trudge along - lean, agile figures - chattering and gesticulating as they go.
But, among the crowd of Orientals, no Europeans are seen, save those who rapidly pass in vehicles of every description from the jolting dos-á-dos onwards - with its diminutive pony almost disappearing between the shalfts - to the elegant victoria drawn by a pair of big Australian horses. But, even when driving, the noon-day heat is dangerous to the Westerner; and the European inmates of the hotel are all in the dark cool verandahs, enjoying a dolce far niente enlivened by chaffering with the natives and drinking iced lemonades. And - here is another surprise for the newcomer! - the ladies wear what seems to be the native dress of sarong and kabaya! A kabaya is a sort of dressing-jacket of profusely-embroidered white batiste, fastened down the front with ornamental pins and little gold chains: and under it is worn the
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sarong, a gaudily-coloured skirt falling down straight and narrow, with one single deep fold in front, which is kept in place by a silk scarf wound several times round the waist, its cords dangling loose. With this costume, little high-heeled slippers are worn on the bare feet; and the hair is done in native style, simply drawn back from the forehead, and twisted into a knot at the back of the head. Altogether, this style of attire is original rather than becoming.
But, if this must be confessed of the ladies, what must be said of the garb some men have the courage to appear in? A kabaya, and (may Mrs. Grundy graciously forgive me for saying it! for how shall I describe the indescribable, save by calling it by its own by me neverto-be-pronounced name?) trousers of thin sarong-stuff gaily sprinkled with blue and yellow flowers, butterflies, and dragons!
But all this is only an indue- | |
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tion into that supreme mystery, celebrated at noon, the rice-table. Here, indeed, in ‘un étouffement nouveau.’ All things pertaining to it work together for bewilderment. To begin with: it is served up, not in any ordinary dining-room, but in the ‘back gallery,’ a place which is a sight in itself, a long and lofty hall, supported on a colonnade, between the white pillars of which glimpses are caught of the brilliantly-flowering shrubs and dark-leaved trees in the garden without. In the second place, it is handed round by native servants, inaudibly moving to and fro upon bare feet, arrayed in clothes of a semi-European cut incongruously combined with the Javanese sarong and head-'kerchief. And, last not least, the meal itself is such as never was tasted in sea or land before. The principal dish is rice and chicken, which sounds simple enough. But, on this as a basis, an entire system of
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things unedible has been constructed: besides fish, flesh, fowl, and frieassees, all manner of curries, sauces, pickles, preserved fruit, salt eggs, fried bananas, ‘sambals’ of fowl's liver, fish-roe, young palm-shoots, and the gods of Javanese cookery alone know what more, all strongly spiced, and sprinkled with cayenne. There is nothing under the sun but it may be made into a sambal; and a conscientious cook would count that a lost day on which he had not sent in at the very least twenty of such nondescript dishes to his master's table, for whose digestion let all gentle souls pray! And, when to all this I shall have added that these many and strange things must be eaten with a spoon in the right and a fork in the left hand, the reader will be able to judge how very complicated an affair the rice-table is, and how easily the uninitiated may come to grief over it. For myself, I shall never forget my first experience
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of the thing. I had just come in from a ride through the town, and I suppose the glaring sunlight, the strangely-accoutred erowd, the novel sights and sounds of the city must have slightly gone to my head (there are plenty of intoxicants besides ‘gin,’ vide the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table). Anyhow, I entered the ‘back gallery’ with a sort of ‘here-the-conquering-hero-comes’ feeling: looked at the long table groaning under its dozens of rice-bowls, scores of dishes of fowls and fish, and hundreds of sambal-saucers, arrayed between pyramids of bananas, angosteens, and pine-apples, as if I could have eaten it all by way of ‘apétitif;’ sat me down; heaped my plate up with everything that came my way; and fell to. What followed, I have no words to express. Suffice it to say, that in less time than I now take to relate it. I was reduced to the most abject misery. My lips smarted with the fiery touch of
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the sambal, my throat the more sorely scorched for the hasty draught of water with which, in my ignorance, I had tried to allay the intolerable heat, and my eyes full of tears, which it was all I could do to prevent from openly gushing down my cheeks, in streams of utter misery. A charitable person told me to put a little salt on my tongue, (as children at home are told to do on the tail of the bird they want to catch). I did so; and, after a minute of the most excruciating torture, the agony subsided. I gasped, and found I was still alive. But there and then I vowed to myself I would never so much as look at a rice-table again. I have broken that vow. I say it proudly. It is but a dull mind which cannot reverse a first opinion, or go back upon a hasty resolve. And now I know how to eat rice; I love it. Still, that first meal was a shock. It suddenly brought home to the senses - what up to that minute had been noted by the understanding only - the fact of my
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being in a new country. The glare of the garden without, the Malay sing-song of those dark bare-footed servants, the nondescript clothes of the other guests, united with the tingling and burning in my throat to make me realise the stupendous change that had come over my universe, the antipodal attitude of things in Europe and things in Java. I had the almost bodily sensation of the intervening leagues upon leagues of the dividing chasm on the unknown side of which I had just landed. And it fairly dizzed me.
Now, the natural reaction following upon a shock of this kind throws one back upon the previous state of things in the case - the ways and manners of the old country - and one stubbornly resolves to adhere to them. But, though this may be natural, it is not wise. I, at least, soon discovered for myself the truth of the old sage's saw: ‘Vérité en decà des Pyrénées, erreur en dela,’ as applied to the affairs of everyday
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life: the more so, as oceans and broad continents, the space of thousands of Pyrenean ranges, separate those hither and thither sides, Holland and Java. The home-marked standard of fit and unfit must be laid aside. The soul must doff her close-clinging babits of prejudiced thought. The wise main must be content to begin life over again, becoming even as a babe and suckling, and opening cherub lips only to drink in the light, the leisure, and the luxuriant beauty of this new country as a rich mother's milk - the blameless food on which to grow up to (colonial) manhood.
But to return to that first ‘rice-table.’ After the rice, curries, etc. had been disposed of, beef and salad appeared, and, to my infinite astonishment, were disposed of in their turn, to be followed by the dessert - pine-apples. mangosteens, velvety ‘rambootans,’ and an exceedingly picturesque and prettily-shaped fruit - spheres of a pale gold containing colourless pellucid flesh
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- which I heard called ‘dookoo.’ Then the guests began to leave the table, and I was told it was time for the siesta - another Javanese institution, not a whit less important, it would appear, than the famous rice-table - and vastly more popular with newcomers. Perhaps, the preceding meal possesses somniferous virtue; or, perhaps, the heat and glare of the morning predispose one to sleep; or, perhaps - after so many years of complaining about ‘being waked too soon’ - the sluggard in us rejoices at being bidden, in the name of the natural fitness of things, to go and slumber again.’ I will not attempt to decide which of those three possible causes is the true one; but so much is certain: even those who kick most vigorously at the rice-table, lie them down with lamb-like meekness to the siesta. I confess I was very glad myself to escape into the coolness and quiet of my room. Plain enough it was, with its bare, white- | |
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washed walls and ceiling, its redtiled floor and piece of coarse matting in the centre, its cane-bottomed chairs. But how I delighted, in the absence of carpets and wall-papers, when I found the stone floor so deliciously cool to the feet, and the bare walls distilling a freshness as of lily-leaves! The siesta lasted to about four. Then people began to hurry past my window, with flying towels and beating slippers, marching to the bath-rooms. And, at five, tea was brought into the verandah.
Then began the first moderately-cool hour of the day. A slight breeze spraing up and wandered about in the garden, stirring the dense foliage of the waringin-tree, and making its hundreds of pendulous air roots gently sway to and fro. A white blossoms-shower fluttered down from the tanjong-branches, spreading fragrance as it fell. And, by and by, a faint rosiness began to soften the crude white of the stuccoed walls and colonnades, and to kindle the feathery
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little cirrus-clouds floating high overhead, in the deep blue sky where the great ‘kalongs’ were already beginning to circle.
At six it was almost dark.
The loungers in the verandah rose from their tea, and went in. And, some half-hour later. I saw the ladies inssuing forth in Paris-made dresses, and the men in the garb of society accompany them on their calls, for which I was told this was the hour. The ‘front gallery’ of the hotel, a spacious hall supported on pillars, was brilliantly lit. A girl sat at the piano, accompanying herself to one of those weird, thrilling songs such as Grieg and Jensen compose them. And when I went in to the eight-o'-clock dinner. the menu for which might have been written in any European hotel, I had some trouble in identifying the scene with that which, earlier in the day, had so rudely shocked my European ideas. I half believed the rice-table, the sarongs and kabayas, and the Javanese
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‘boys’ must have been a dream, until I was convinced of the contrary by the sight of a brown lean hand thrust out to change my plate of fish for a helping of asparagus.
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